Making Law: The Politics of Statistics

Should we make laws solely based on statistics? After all statistics can be discriminating and do not always show the big picture. To begin with, most of these statistically based laws are not just, because they do not protect you from another, they protect you from yourself.



When they make a statistic, you only see focus on what they have diagnosed has the problem they would solve if they took this action and not revealing the truth of it, that it is more politically motivated than it is making you safer. You simply leave out what may be inconvenient to your stats and add that which is more favorable to them. You can use statistics for most anything to make an appearance of something being unsafe and once you make it an emotional appeal it is very hard to make any logical appeal at that point.



Once you go down this road and make it a precedent, how can you tell anyone who has just lost someone that you will not make a law to protect others from their loved ones fate. It certainly would not sound very well to tell them that you are sorry for their loss and that freedom comes with certain risks to keep it. So, a politician buckles to pressure and we make a law that requires you to wear your seatbelt, or denies you some other choice that protects you from no one but, is made law based on emotional appeal and statistics that will not reveal how many others have not been harmed. Not to mention motorcyclists have no seatbelt, should we make it illegal to ride them? More importantly the most important fact lost in this debate is your right to choose is lost. Yet, you still have a right to risk your life skiing at high speeds down a slope, sky diving, rock climbing, etc… All of those activities putting their participants at high risk.



The thing that is of most concern to me is, to what end statistics will be used? We should never use statistics to make a case for a law. What should be used is reasoned arguments that do not make a case based on emotion. Protecting us from ourselves should never be law, it should be choice, as long as we do not harm others buy are actions.

- M. Garry